Guadalajara: Establishing a human colony on Mars could soon become a reality, courtesy - SpaceX founder Elon Musk!
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Monday unveiled his highly ambitious plans to send humans to Mars, using a massive rocket and a fleet of spaceships to achieve a self-sustaining population on the Red Planet this century.
Speaking at the International Astronautical Congress in the western Mexican city of Guadalajara, Musk said his goal was to "make Mars seem possible.
He showed a futuristic video depicting his ideas for an interplanetary transport system based on re-usable rockets, a propellant farm on Mars and 1,000 spaceships on orbit, carrying about 100 people each.
The spacecraft would have a restaurant, cabins, zero-gravity games and movies.
"It has to be fun or exciting. It can't feel cramped or boring," he said.
The first flight would be expensive but the aim is "making this affordable to almost anyone who wants to go," by dropping the price of a ticket over time to USD 100,000, Musk said.
Millions of tons of cargo would also need to blast off aboard a powerful rocket, which he described as a "scaled-up version of the Falcon 9 booster," the company's current rocket system that can land vertically.
He also said that reducing cost would be another key hurdle to establishing a human civilisation on Mars.
"We aim to improve the cost per ton to Mars by five million per cent," Musk said.
"You can't create a self-sustaining civilisation on Mars if the ticket price is USD 10 billion per person."
SpaceX has said it plans to send an unmanned Dragon cargo capsule to Mars as early as 2018, paving the way for a human mission that would leave Earth in 2024 and arrive on the Red Planet the following year.
If all goes according to plan, Musk said the reusable ITS will help humanity establish a permanent, self-sustaining colony on the Red Planet within the next 50 to 100 years.
(With AFP inputs)
